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SPEECH 



OF 



HON. JAMES W. WALL, OF NEW JERSEY, 



ON 



THE INDEMNIFICATION BILL; 



DELIVERED 



IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, MARCH 3, 1663. 



WASHINGTON: 
1863. 







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SPEECH. 



The Senate having under consideration the report of the 
committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the 
two Houses on the bill (H. R. No. 591) to indemnify the 
President and other persons for suspending the privilege 
of the writ of habeai corpus and acts done in pursuance 
thereof— 

Mr. WALL said-. 

Mr. President: I look upon this bill as fraught 
in its consequences with more terrible mischief to 
the best interests of this country than any of the 
dangerous projects that have sprung, like Minerva, 
but without her wisdom, full armed , from the busy 
brain of the chairman of the Military Committee. 
It is more pregnant with evil for the Republic than 
was the belly of the Trojan horse to Ilium. And 
now is the time, here the place, " where the wild- 
fig trees join the walls of Troy," when all those 
who would defend the palladium of constitutional 
liberty must meet the foe and drive him back, if 
it is not already too late. Here, if we must per- 
ish, we should perish together. We must fight 
to the last, for if this bill once passes there is no 
Latium for us to fly to. 

This bill clothes the President of the United 
States, with the aid of the conscription bill passed 
on Sunday morning, with the panoply of the vast 
powers and functions of a dictator. The dicta- 
tor who in the hour of a nation's peril came forth 
from the Roman senate, with absolute will over 
the life, liberty, and property of the Roman citi- 
zen, never had any more power than this bill con- 
fers upon the President of the United States. 
When the decree for the appointment of a dicta- 
tor went forth from the conscript fathers of Rome, 
they vailed the statues of Liberty that stood in 
every market-place, in every boarium, in every 
forum, and in every temple throughout the vast 



extent of the empire. The shrouded, silent forms 
of this goddess gave notice everywhere to the 
Roman citizen that his absolute rights were taken 
away. But under this bill, Mr. President, there 
will be no such notice to the citizen of this Re- 
public. By this bill you place at the discretion of 
the President the grave power to suspend the 
great writof right of the people of the entire coun 
try at his option. You actually confer upon him 
the functions of a legislator, the right by his own 
volition to suspend a law; a right which I hold 
under the Constitution belongs alone to Congress) 
and which it has no more right to delegate to him 
than a trustee would have a right to delegate trust a 
power. This bill is only an embodiment of that 
pestilential political heresy with which this war 
commenced — and to which I shall address myself 
presently — that the right to suspend the privilege 
of the writ of habeas corpus was an executive and 
not a legislative power — apolitical heresy boldly 
sustained in this Chamber by the Senator from 
New Jersey who preceded me, but who has now 
gone, to enjoy his reward for having unlearned 
the legal lessons that had been taught him, where, 
I may say, the Democracy cease from troubling, 
and the wearied politically are at rest — for it is a 
life estate. I shall take occasion before I conclude 
to allude to some of the points in his speech, for 
the purpose of refuting them, and placing my pro- 
test upon the record against the infamous doctrine 
it contains, and the gross insult that it offers to 
those great men who laid the foundations of this 
Republic, with a view to the public happiness, by 
securing to the citizen those absolute rights which 
such a doctrine as this overturns at a blow. 

Let this bill pass, Mr. President, and it places 
the liberty of every citizen in the loyal States at 



the will of the President of the United States, with 
no check, no control; and it reopens the iron- 
studded doors of the casemates in your bastiles, 
to be filled, as before, by men against whom no 
accusation has been lodged, and who seek in vain 
to meet their accusers face to face before the legal 
tribunals of the land. Again will the post offices, 
as they were before, become each like the lion's 
mouth of Venice, where the secret informer may 
lodge his lying accusation; and from a tribunal as 
inexorable as the far-famed Council of Ten shall 
come as swift and as sure the mandate that con- 
signs him to some military dungeon of the Repub» 
lie, which desecrates the names of those martyrs 
to liberty, it maybe Fort Warren, it maybe Fort 
La Fayette. This bill, if it passes, establishes in 
tie President arbitrary power; and history in forms 
us that arbitrary power is progressive, untiring, 
unresting. It never halts or looks backward. As 
one has eloquently said of it: 

" Call it by what holy name you will, sanctify it by what 
pretexts or purposes of patriotism you may, under any flag, 
in any cause, anywhere and everywhere, it is the foe of 
human rights, and by the very law of its being is incapable 
of good. There is, there can be no life for liberty but in 
the supreme and absolute dominion of law. This lesson 
is written in letters of blood and fire all over the history of 
nations. It is the standing moral of the annals of '•^publics 
since their records began. It is legible upon the marbles 
of the elder world ; it echoes in the strife and revolutions 
of the new. Wherever men have thought great thoughts 
and died brave deaths for human progress, its everlasting 
truth has been proclaimed." 

An encroachment upon the Constitution, strik- 
ing arbitrarily at the personal liberty of every 
citizen in the land, is but one of the paths leading 
straight toward despotism. There are numerous 
others, but they all run parallel to this. Let the 
nation, or the nation's representatives, submit in 
silence and indifference to such a bold usurpation 
of power as I conceive is contained in this infa- 
mous bill, and from that moment the manly cour- 
age which is, the defense, and the sleepless vigi- 
lance that is the price of liberty, is gone. Every 
>i)<e of these pathways lies open, inviting the tread 
of usurpation. Said the aged Selden in reply to 
the ministers of Charles I: 

" The personal liberty of the subject is the life and the 
heart's blood of the commonwealth, and if the common- 
wealth bleed in that master vein, all the balm of Gilead is 
but in vain to preserve this our body- politic from ruin and 
destruction." 

Said Algernon Sidney, England's noblest mar- 
tyr: 

" He who oppugns the liberty of the subject under the 
constitution of this realm, and in violation of it, not only 
overthrows his own, but is guilty of the most brutish of all 
follies." 

These noble words were literally sprinkled, and 
so consecrated, by that noble martyr's blood. It 



was for their utterance he died, the noblest, proud- 
est name upon the martyr roll. He was alike 
inflexible to king and protector — the champion of 
liberty against despotism — in the study, atthe bar, 
in the prison, and upon the scaffold. To him the 
world owes those great and eloquent discourses, 
the first complete definition and exegesis of the 
true nature and duties of government, full of brave 
and noble sentiments, the well-stored armory from 
which the fathers of our Republic drew the strong- 
est and the sharpest shafts they shot against the 
breast of despotism. 

In view of the vast powers which the Congress 
of the United States propose to give to the Presi- 
dent under the provisions of this bill, I would in- 
vite attention to the following sagacious words 
uttered by Lord Temple in the British Parliament 
at the commencement of the last century: 

" Rashly and willfully to exercise a power clearly against 
law and the constitution is too great a boldness for this 
country at any time, and the suspending or dispensing pow- 
er, that edged tool which has cut so deep, is the last that 
any monarch in his wits, in any emergency, would dare to 
handle in England. It is a rock that English history has 
warned against with awful beacon lights. Its exercise lost 
one prince his crown and head, and at last drove his family 
out of the realm. A minister or representative who is not 
afraid of the exercise of such an iniquitous power, is neither 
fit for sovereign or subject." 

Strange and startling as the truth may appear, 
Mr. President, this suspending power of the abso- 
lute rights of the citizen which in peace or war was 
considered too hazardous to use, either by king, 
minister, or representative, has proved the easiest 
thing for republican America in this high noon of 
the nineteenth century. Nay, sir, more startling 
even than this, it has even been declared treason 
to question for one moment the right to its exer- 
cise. That power the use of which cost one prince 
his crown and head, and drove his family out of 
the realm, has been sported with, and is to be 
again, by the President of the United States, hold- 
ing his office under a limited Constitution, and 
where the absolute rights of the citizen were sup- 
posed to have been placed far beyond the reach of 
the tyrant grasp of arbitrary power. Fortunately, 
for the time, an indignant people rose to vindicate 
their outraged rights, and struck terror into the 
hearts of their rulers. Pass this bill, and we shall 
have the same abnormal acts recommenced, and 
one by one the landmarks of the Constitution will 
be obliterated, the laws suspended, the personal 
liberty of the subject assailed, and provost mar- 
shals and marshals like the cowled "familiars" 
of the Inquisition dogging the footsteps of the citi- 
zen and tracking him to his doom. 

The time was once, Mr. President, in this Re- 



public, we might say of Americans, as was said 

to King John by the archbishop— 

« Let every Briton, as his mind be free, 
Hi* person safe, tiis property secure, 
His liouse as sacred as the fane of heaven, 
Watching unseen his ever open door, 
Watching the realm, the spirit of the laws j 
His fate determined by the rules of right, 
No hand invisible to write his doom, 
No demon starting at the midnight hour 
To draw his curtain, or to drag him down 
To mansions of despair." 

" Inviolable preserve 
The sacred shield that covers all the land— 
The heaven-confessed palladium of the isle— 
To Britain's sons, the judgment of their peers, 
tin theo great pillars : freedom of the mind, 
Freedom of speech, and freedom of the pen, 
Forever changing, yet forever sure, 
The base of Britain rests." 
The time was, sir, when this noble eulogy, pro- 
nounced by Shakspeare on the British constitu- 
tion, might be more aptly applied to our own. 
The great American charter of our freedom had 
more than confirmed to us these laws of the Con- 
fessor, and cur people had given them as free, as 
full , and as sovereign a consent as was ever given 
by John to the bishops and the barons of Runny- 
mede. The mind of the citizen was free, his per- 
son was safe, his property secure, his house his 
castle, the spirit of the laws his body-guard and 
his house-guard. Would he propagate truth ? 
Truth was free to combat error. Would he propa- 
gate error? Error itself might stalk abroad and do 
her mischief, and make night itself grow darker, 
provided truth was left free to follow, however 
slowly, with her torches to light up the wreck. 

But who is it that takes a retrospective glance 
over the stirring, awful history of the last two 
years, but feels how the fine gold has grown dim 
beneath the tarnishing touch of the hand of des- 
potic power? Those great, absolute rights of the 
citizen, which were intended to be beyond the 
reach of arbitrary influence, the right of personal 
liberty, of property, of free speech and a free press, 
rudely and ruthlessly violated. Of these abso- 
lute rights, during what was not inaptly called 
the reign of terror, there was not one that was not 
trampfed upon by the Executive or his subordi- 
nates; and what was worse than all, every assault 
that was made upon them was applauded to the 
echo by jurists, lawyers, divines, and contract- 
hunting renegade Democrats, whose cowardly 
hearts either ran away with their betterjudgments, 
or who really did not understand the very first 
principles of the Constitution under which they 
lived. Men were arrested and papers seized with- 
- out warrant or oath of probable cause; prisoners 
were held without presentment or indictment, de- 



nied a speedy and public trial, nay, refused a trial 
altogether, carried away*by force from the State 
or district where their offense must have been 
committed, and incarcerated for months in the 
bastiles of theGovernment, and then set free with- 
out being even informed of the nature and cause 
of the accusation against them. Every constitu- 
tional outpost was driven in, and every personal 
guarantee of the citizen brushed away by the Ex- 
ecutive as easily as cobwebs by the hands of a 
giant. And this by a Government professing it 
was fighting for the Union, the Constitution, and 
the enforcement of the laws; for those at the cut- 
set of this war were the proud words that glittered 
upon your advancing standards. Doctrine's were 
preached in high places directly at war with all 
the fundamental principles of free government. 
The central power, under the bald pretense of pre- 
serving the Government, assumed a new and fear- 
ful energy, until men went about with " bated 
breath and whispering humbleness," not know- 
in°- where the next blow was to fall, or who wai» 
the next friend that was to be stricken down at 
their sides. Of these times I may exclaim, "quo- 
rum pars fui." 

It was my lot to have felt the grasp of arbitrary 
power, and within the damp, grated casemates of 
one of the bastiles of the Government, to have 
learned how helpless a thing is the citizen who is 
deprived of those absolute rights, which, if t§ey do 
not exist in your Constitution, your Constitution 
is a miserable delusion and a snare. Having been 
arrested without cause shown, I wasliberated in the 
same way, after enduring personal indignities, 
which, to a high-spirited man.eatlikeiron into the 
soul. And from the hour of my liberation up to this 
moment, where I stand upon this floor, the repre- 
sentative of a sovereign State, I have been unable 
to learn what those charges are. 1 have in vain de- 
manded of the proper Department what were the 
charges against me, claiming the freeman's con- 
stitutional privilege "to be informed of the nature 
and cause of the accusation, and to be confronted 
with the witnesses against me." Great heavens » 
Mr. President, is it possible that such things can 
be, under a Constitution whose boast it has been 
that it was for the protection of the inalienable 
rights of men against oppression ? If this boast 
has been in vain, then, sir, that Constitution hae 
but a name to live, an outer seeming to beguile 
and deceive, a Sodom apple, a hectic flush— 

" Painting the cheek upon which it preys." 
The liberty I claim, and those who act with me, 



6 



under that Constitution is not the liberty of li- 
centiousness; it is the liberty united with law; 
liberty sustained by law; and that kind of liberty 
we have always supposed was guarantied to every 
man, rich or poor, high or low, proud or humble, 
under all exigencies, whether in peace or war, and 
whether that war is foreign, or the State is in the 
fearful throes of civil strife. This is my loyalty 
and that of my political friends on this door — the 
allegiance, the devotion to organic laws. 1 know 
no other loyalty, and I will not bow myself at the 
shrine of any other. In this Republic, its Consti- 
tution declares: 

" No citizen 6liall be deprived of his life, liberty, or prop- 
erty, without due process of law." 

He may be made to part with all three by the 
power of the Stale; but that power must look well 
to it, sir, that in its exercise it does not transcend 
the limits in which it is appointed it to move. If it 
does, it becomes despotic; and then, among men 
who know their rights, and knowing dare main- 
tain, resistance follows as naturally as light suc- 
ceeds to darkness. If by a simple mandate, nay, 
by the lightning flash over the telegraph wire, of 
any Cabinet officer, in States where the people are 
loyal, and where the courts of law are open, you 
or I may be torn from our homesand consigned for 
an indefinite time to the gloomy walls of a Govern- 
ment fortress, the same mandate or dispatch, only 
. altered in its phraseology, may consign us im- 
mediately to the hands of the executioner, or de- 
prive us of our properties, confiscating them to the 
State. If not, why not? The right to have our lives 
secure against interference without due process of 
law is equally guarantied in the same clause which 
protects our liberty and our property. These priv- 
ileges can trace their lineage back to the grassy 
lawns of Runnymede, where they were born more 
than six hundred years ago. They were extorted 
then and there by the rebellious barons, and uttered 
in glowing language that has come down to us from 
the ages long ago, and is still sounding in our ears 
as the sweetest note that ever came from the sil- 
ver clarion of freedom. Listen, Senators, to the 
music, strong and sweet as it sounded in the sol- 
emn midnight centuries ago: 

" No freeman shall be seized or imprisoned, ordisseized, 
or outlawed, or in any way destroyed ; nor will we go upon 
him or send upon him, except by the judgment of his peers, 
or the law of the land." 

Our fathers caught the inspiring strain, and it 
was prolonged in that sonorous sentence in ou row n 
once glorious Constitution: " no person shall be 
deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due 



process of law;" "due process of law," the law 
which hears before it condemns, and punishes 
only after conviction. 

Mr. President, every arrest made during the 
reign of terror by the President or his subordinates 
was in direct antagonism to this fundamental prin- 
ciple of our Constitution, violative of its solemn 
sanctions, and, because abnormal, revolutionary; 
for it encouraged, nay, sanctified resistance. I re- 
member well, sir, the excitement in Europe when 
the King of Naples, the infamous Bomba, seized 
a few young men of the first families by military 
force, who were engaged in plotting against his 
throne, and immured them in those horrid dun- 
geons, blasted out of a rock, in that State fortress 
which, like La Fayette in the bay of New York, 
is the only dark and hateful thing upon the bright 
waters of the beautiful bay of Naples. The mil- 
itary guard, without warning, without accusation, 
just as was done with the members of the Mary- 
land Legislature and the Baltimore prisoners, sur- 
rounded their houses at the midnight hour, and 
they were torn suddenly from the luxurious com- 
forts of their splendid homes, to be immured in 
those awful prison-houses, wet with " the ac- 
cursed dew of dungeon damp," sunk far below 
the surface of the waters of the Neapolitan bay. 
They were suspected of treasonable practices. 
Their offense had that extent, no more. A cry of 
horror went up from almost every nation in Eu- 
rope, and from the then un trammeled press of 
the American Republic. England remonstrated 
through the manly, eloquent appeal of her indig- 
nant Gladstone. France raised her voice in de- 
nunciation of the outrage; while republican Amer- 
ica shuddered as she thanked God "that no such 
outrage could ever stain her national escutcheon." 
We professed to know then what liberty was 
worth; and as we sent cheering wtrds to those 
brave spirits engaged in the work of Italian lib- 
eration, we told those rebellious children of the 
sun, " it is worth all your struggles, every sacri- 
fice, and oceans of blood." The vengeance of an 
oppressed people soon rose to vindicate the race 
and punish the oppressor. In vain were her dun- 
geons filled and her hearthstones desolate. The 
bright dream of "Italia Libera" remained, the 
scattered manna upon which the concealed enthu- 
siasm of a whole nation fed itself, and to-day Na- 
ples is redeemed, disinthralled. The Bourbon's 
family is in exile, and the people's king rules over 
the warm hearts that welcomed him to the throne. 
Vengeance is certain, sooner or later, to overtake 
the oppressor; and the Nemesis of retribution. 



with the flaming sword, follows swiftly after the 
tyrant. 

But the objection of the danger to the public 
liberty and safety is not the only objection to this 
bill. It is by its own title an indemnity bill, and 
proposes to shelter behind the protecting aegis of 
its strange legislation the unlawful acts of the 
President and his subordinates. In other words, 
it proposes to legalize an illegality. It is the le- 
gislative power sheltering the executive branch of 
the Government from the consequences of its ab- 
normal, unconstitutional acts. You might as well 
attempt by legislation to screen the judiciary from 
the consequences of malfeasance in office. If one 
department can thus protect the other, I ask, what 
becomes of official responsibility and the obliga- 
tions of official oaths? 

I hold, sir, that the remedy is provided by the 
Constitution, article second, section four, in case 
the President is guilty of any official misconduct. 
By that article he is made liable to impeachment 
for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and 
misdemeanors. The President may violate his 
official duty in three ways: 1. By refusing to ex- 
ecute the laws and treaties of the United States. 
2. By usurping a power not confided to him by 
the Constitution, although in some cases this may 
amount to treason. 3. By an arbitrary and cor- 
rupt use of an authority lawful in itself, but which 
was intended to be exercised with a yingle view 
to the public good, to answer the purposes of a 
selfish intrigue. In England the king is not con- 
stitutionally answerable for any of his official con- 
duct; but it is presumed that he always acts by 
Ihe advice of his ministers, and they are held 
personally responsible for all political measures 
adopted during theiradministration. Some of them 
have suffered capitally for such alleged miscon- 
duct. It is on this account, in part, that minis- 
ters send in their resignation as soon as they find 
that the majority of Parliament is against them. 
Buthere it is different. The President is answer- 
able for his own official conduct, and is liable to 
impeachment for any default in the discharge of 
his sworn duty. To say that any coordinate 
branch of this Government could shield him from 
the consequences of such acts would be an absurd- 
ity, and tend to annihilate the whole system upon 
which this Government was founded. 

Again, this bill, if I understand it, not only 
proposes to shelter the President from the conse- 
quences of illegal acts— for the provisions of the 
bill really amount to this, if fully carried out— but 
to protect and shelter those of his subordinates 



whom he may have commanded to perform uncon- 
stitutional or illegal acts. Now, Mr. President, 
if there is one fundamental principle of law better 
established than any other, it is this: that, within 
the limits of their respective powers, all officers, 
from the President of the United States down- 
wards, ought to be submitted to and obeyed; but 
if they shoxdd overstep the limits of their official au- 
thority, if they should usurp powers not delegated 
to them by the Constitution , or by some law made 
in pursuance of it, they would cease to be under 
the protection of their offices, and would be rec- 
ognized merely as private citizens for any act of 
injustice or oppression they might commit, and 
liable to a civil or criminal prosecution in the same 
manner as a private citizen, with this distinction: 
that if the wrong-doer has availed himself of hie of- 
ficial character, or of the opportunities which his 
office affords him, to commit acts of injustice or op- 
pression, it will be considered as a great aggrava- 
tion of his guilt in a criminal prosecution, and will 
be a ground for a jury to find exemplary damages 
in a civil action. This is the principle that runs 
through all the cases; and all the indemnity bills 
that Congress might pass from now to the crack 
of doom would not disturb the force and efficacy 
of that principle, in the mind of a high-minded, 
intelligent jurist, who had a professional reputa- 
tion to guard, however it might affect those imi- 
tators of the Crawleys and Vernons of the first 
Charles's day, who have crawled to judicial po- 
sitions by base servility and disgusting obse- 
quiousness, and who might be willing to exclaim, 
as they did in the ship-money case— 

'< That the king, pro bono publico, may charge his subjecto 
both in their properties and persons for the safety and de- 
fense of the kingdom, notwithstanding any act ot rar'ia- 
ment, and may even dispense with law in case of necessity. 
The attempt of the President to shelter his sub- 
ordinates from responsibility upon the sic vole, 
sic jubeo principle, is only another phase of the 
delusion under which men's minds have been la- 
boring. He certainly ought to be lawyer enough 
to know that the Supreme Court has decided in 
2 Cranch, 119— 



••That if the President should mistake the construction 
of an act of Congress or of the Constitution, and, in c»- 
sequence of it, should give instructions not warranted by 
the act or the Constitution, any aggrieved party might re- 
cover damages against the officer acting under such in- 
structions, which, though given by the President, would fur- 
nish no justification or excuse." 

I admit that in general, when a particular duty 
devolves upon the President, but the means to be 
used in discharge of it are not pointed out, he 
may adopt those which are most proper for that 
purpose, provided they art not repvgnant to the Con- 



8 



stitution or prohibited by acts of Congress. Thus, 
in time of war, he has the right to use all the cus- 
tomary means to carry it into effect, but he can- 
not override the Constitution in doing it. It would 
not, perhaps, be a sufficient foundation for an im- 
peachment if the President should make use of the 
discretion intrusted to him by the Constitution or 
laws of the United States imprudently and inju- 
diciously; for, in any such case, the people must 
be eontent with the honest exercise of such ability 
as they see fit to elevate to this high office. But 
they havearightto expect, nay, demand, integrity 
and fairpurposes and intentions, and that the civil 
rights guarantied to them by their fathers shall 
be scrupulously preserved. Many very honest 
citizens think that in a time of war or rebellion 
the President becomes by some political legerde- 
main invested with all the functions of a dictator, 
and holds the lives, liberties, and properties of the 
citizen in his all-powerful grasp. Within the 
sphere of his constitutional duties the President 
may justly claim the support of all good citizens; 
but when he transcends the powers conferred on 
him by the Constitution to strike down the liber- 
ties of the subject, he must expect, nay, he invites 
opposition. Some Senators, on the other side of 
this Chamber, seem to think that the test of loy- 
alty is to be found in a blind adhesion to the Presi- 
dent and his administration; but I would say to 
them that my loyalty is akin to that so well de- 
scribed in those lines of Cowper: 

" We too are friends to loyalty : we love 
The king who loves the law, respects its bounds, 
And reigns content within them." 

As to the responsibility of high officials, there 
are very many in the community who labor under 
the erroneous idea that the office protects the 
transgressor. The legal authorities are all the 
other way. Both the authorities in this country 
and England point but one way upon this subject. 
In England the responsibility of an official who 
usurps power has never been questioned, and the, 
loftiest officials have been held to a just retribution 
for their wrongs, and governors admitted to be 
viceroys in effect have been made to answer for 
their assumptions of power, not only in their es- 
tates, but with their lives. What said Chief Jus- 
tice Pratt, afterwards Lord Camden, in overruling 
a motion for a new trial made by the defendant in 
an action of trespass for arresting the plaintiff on 
a warrant from Lord Halifax, the Secretary of 
State? 

" tf the jury had been confined by their oath to consider 
ttoe mere personal injury only, perhaps twenty pounds dam- 



ages would have been sufficient; but the small injury done 
the plaintiff and the lowness of his station did not appear 
to the jury in that striking light in which the great point of 
law touehins the liberty of the subject appeared to them 
on the trial ; they saw a magistrate over all the king's sub- 
jects exercising arbitrary power, violating* Magna Charta, 
and attempting to destroy the liberty of the kingdom by in- 
sisting upon the legality of general warrants in a tyrannical 
and severe manner. These are the ideas which struck the 
jury and induced them to give these heavy damages. I think 
they have done right. To enter a man's house and drag him 
from thence by means of an unconstitutional warrant is 
worse than the Spanish Inquisition — a law under which no 
Englishman would wish to live an hour. It was a most dar- 
ing public attack made upon the liberty of the subject." 

Pass this bill, Mr. President, and you not only 
confer upon the President an authority which I 
conceive you have no power to confer, but you 
also, by your legislation, give to him and his sub- 
ordinates assurance that they may do the like 
again, and escape the punishment that should al- 
ways be meted out to violations of constitutional 
law. It does really seem to me, sir, when I listen 
to Senators on the other side defending acts which 
they admit to be abnormal, and insisting that the 
public necessities demand the sacrifice, as if those 
gentlemen were trying to persuade us that the best 
way to preserve our liberties would be to give 
them up, and that the surest mode of securing a 
government of law would be to suffer arbitrary 
power to destroy it. "The dearest interests of 
this country," said Junius — and I adopt his ner- 
vous language — "are its laws and its constitu- 
tion. Against every attack upon these, there will, 
I hope, be always found among us the firmest 
spirit of resistance, superior to the united efforts 
of faction and ambition." 

Mr. President, this bill, in leaving it discretion- 
ary with the President at any time and place and 
at his own option to suspend the privilege of this 
great writ, in fact gives countenance and support 
to that political heresy that the right to suspend 
the writ exists in the President of the United States, 
and not in Congress. This bill does not suspend 
the privilege of the writ; it leaves it for the Presi- 
dent to do, whenever he thinks the public exigency 
demands it. It certainly could never have been the 
intention of the framers of the Constitution to au- 
thorize the Executive to suspend the privileges of 
the writ at his option. If this was a novel question, 
that had never been mooted before, one might well 
understand how there might possibly be some 
variance in men's opinions. But when it is con- 
sidered that in 1807 it had a most thorough and 
exhausting discussion in Congress; that it had 
been before the judicial tribunals of the country, 
and frequently the subject of discussion by com- 
mentators upon the Constitution and by states- 
men; that up to the year 1861 there was an entire 







unanimity of opinion as to where the powerto sus- 
pend the privileges of this writ rested, namely, in 
the legislative department of the Government, we 
can only be astonished that there should be any 
difference of opinion about it. But now we are 
told that the peculiar legal optics of modern states- 
men and lawyers have been enabled to discover 
that which the keen, searching, patriotic vision 
of the men who framed the. Constitution failed to 
see. That which the luminous perception of Mar- 
shall, Kent, Story, and Curtis could not discover, 
has been reserved for the keener optics of Bates 
and Lincoln. 

It appears to me, Mr. President, that the true 
spirit of the habeas corpus clause in the Constitu- 
tion is as clear as sunlight to any man who will 
study the debates both at the time of the forma- 
tion of the Constitution and when it was submitted 
to the States for theiradoption. There were mem- 
bers in the Convention who were in favor of mak- 
ing the enjoyment of the privilege of the writ ab- 
solute at all times, in the same manner that it was 
intended the liberty of the press, of speech, and 
of religion should be enjoyed. There were others 
again who favored limitations of time and suspen- 
sion on certain conditions. The clause itself, there- 
fore, appears to me to have been a mean between 
extremes of opinion, and was intended to recon- 
cile conflicting views. There is very little light 
thrown upon the subject by the discussion in the 
Convention ; but the peculiar position occupied by 
the clause in the Constitution is significant, and 
if not conclusive is certainly suggestive of the 
particular department upon which it was intended 
to confer this power. But if from the proceedings 
of the Convention and the debates in that body 
nothing satisfactory can be gleaned upon the sub- 
ject, much may be learned from the after debates 
in the State conventions. We shall give but one 
reference upon this subject, although we might 
quote many others. Governor Randolph, of Vir- 
ginia, who had much to do with the fashioning of 
our Constitution, in a speech in reply to Patrick 
Henry in the Virginia convention, who had as- 
sailed the Constitution because it conferred the 
power to suspend the privilege of the writ of ha- 
beas corpus upon the Legislature, said: 

" I contend, Mr. President, that the habeas corpus in this 
Constitution is at least on as good and secure a footing as 
in England. In that country its suspension depends upon 
the Legislature and not upon the Crown. That great writ 
of right can only be suspended here in the same way, by 
the Legislature in cases of extreme peril, never by the Ex- 
ecutive." 

Our fathers very justly conceived that in dan- 



gerous, critical times like the present, the people 
would be willing to part with a portion of their 
freedom temporarily; but the warning voice of 
history had clearly indicated to them that suoh 
loss to be endurable must rest in the discretion of 
their representatives, and not in the breast of one 
man. They had studied the causes of revolu- 
tionary action too closely not to know that this 
one-man power would not be tolerated for a mo- 
ment except by those who, to use the language 
of Thomas Jefferson, were born with saddlesA>n 
their backs and bits in their mouths, that tyrants 
might ride and spur them by the grace of God. 

The men of our early day, Mr. President, had 
a perfect horror of conferring arbitrary power 
upon a single individual. For them arbitrary 
power in whatever shape it appeared, whether 
under the vail of legitimacy, skulking in the dis- 
guise of State necessity, or presenting the shame- 
less front of usurpation, was the sure object of 
their detestation and hostility. They might give 
this tremendous power to suspend the privileges 
of this writ to the law-making authority, because 
the act of suspension was a legislative act, and 
because in this way due notice would be given to 
the citizen when the exigency arrived; but to 
leave it optional in the discretion of one man, 
however exalted or honest he might be, to strike 
down the liberty of the citizen without warning, 
as has been done, this these haters of tyranny 
would never have consented to. They believed, 
in the language of Burke, in his speech on the 
impeachment of Hastings: 

" It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in rell 
gion, it is wickedness in polities to say that any one man 
in a free State should possess arbitrary power over the lib- 
erty of the citizen, either in peace or war." 

It was unquestionably the grand aim of the 
framers of the Constitution of the United States 
to establish a Government which would not only 
be nominally free, but substantially so. It was 
with this view they reared those barriers to polit- 
ical maladministration which had been unfolded 
to their observation, and were the gathered wis- 
dom of a thousand years. They knew that the 
safety of the people was the supreme law, but 
they believed the Constitution. They believed 
that above that Constitution there was no law; 
outside of it there was no security. 

The Senator from New Jersey who preceded 
me on this floor, in an elaborate speech that he 
delivered while here, stated that the language of 
the habeas corpus clause in our Constitution was 
new and peculiar; and that in discussing where 



10 



this power of suspension resided, we must set 
aside the analogies of English history altogether. 
What he meant to convey by this idea I am at a 
loss to know. He must have been strangely 
oblivious to English precedents, where the use of 
this clause may be found almost in the very words 
used by Mr.Pinckneyhimself,who doubtless bor- 
rowed them from thence. He is no less unfortu- 
nate when he attempts to show that the analogies 
of English history must be excluded, and have no 
bearing upon the point in issue. Any school-boy, 
with but a smattering of English history, could 
have told him better. All his ingenuity will fail 
to convince the people of New Jersey that their 
fathers had no reference to and no thought of 
those eventful centuries of strife between the king 
and the people, amid whose fierce throes this 
great privilege was born. Why, there never was 
a time in English constitutional history when the 
power of suspending this writ did not exist some- 
where. There can be no manner of doubt on this 
point. The controversy always was, where does 
it reside, in the Parliament or in the Crown? The 
formal contest for this discretion to imprison and 
detain without trial marked the change in the Eng- 
lish Government from monarchy to aristocracy, 
and thence to democracy, as this power over the 
lex terra has resided in one or other of these de- 
partments of the Government from the Conquest 
to this time. The personal liberty of the subject 
was a natural, inherent right, which could not be 
surrendered or forfeited unless by the commission 
of some great and startling crime. This was a 
doctrine coeval with the first rudiments of the 
English constitution, and handed down from An- 
glo-Saxon ancestry, notwithstanding their Danish 
struggles; asserted afterwards and confirmed by 
the Conqueror himself; and though sometimes 
much impaired by the ferocity of the times and the 
occasional despotism of jealous, exacting princes, 
yet established on the firmest basis by the pro- 
visions of Magna Charta and a long succession of 
statutes on through the grand struggle over the 
Petition of Right, until it culminated in the great 
habeas corpus act of Charles II, justly styled a sec- 
ond Magna Charta. 

It would require something more than Senator 
Field's dictum to make good such a false and 
forced position as this. The history of England 
for centuries is against him; the sentiments of all 
her historians are antagonistic to his position ; and 
lastly, the declarations of the men who assisted 
in framing our Constitution stand in his way. 
During the struggle between the monarch and the 



Commons in 1628, in reference to a royal grant of 

a declaration of rights, Charles I took the very 

ground sustained by Mr. Field and the Senators 

on the other side of the Chamber: 

"That there might be times of rebellion, times of danger 
to the State, when the safety of the commonwealth and 
the necessities of the hour might demand the unrestricted 
exercise of the royal prerogative, and, for the time being. 
the liberty of the subject inu6t give way." 

This, too, was the obsequious language of the 
House of Lords who, at that time, stood by the 
king against the freedom-loving House of Com- 
mons. Let us glance for a momentet the history 
of those times; carry our minds back to the age 
of those stern, unyielding men who, in spite of 
the terrors of the royal frown, then and there es- 
tablished a barrier against the encroachment of 
the king's prerogative. Let us listen to their very 
words, to learn if we cannot catch, from those 
who resisted usurpation then, some traces of that 
spirit which, more than a century after, on this 
side of the Atlantic, manifested itself in the bear- 
ing and actions of the men of 1787. Let us see, 
sir, whether, as Mr. Field says, the analogies of 
English history can be set aside in considering 
that clause in our Constitution forming, if rightly 
respected , the great bulwark of the freedom of the 
citizen. Said Sergeant Ashley, in that memora- 
ble debate constituting a landmark in history: 

" Divine truth informs us that kings have their power 
from God, and are representative gods; the Psalmist calling 
them the children of the Most High. Can we conceive, 
then, that so exalted a person as the kin,' iialh so far com- 
mitted the power of the sword to inferior magistrates, that 
he hath not reserved so much supreme power as to commit 
an offender to prison without showing cause, and without 
warrant? I contend, therefore, that for offenses against the 
State, in times of rebellion or in critical emergencies, the 
king or his council hath lawful power to punish by impris- 
onment without showing cause. The martial law, though 
not to be exercised in times of peace, when recourse may 
be had to the king's courts, yet in times of invasion or other 
times of hostility, when an army royal is in the field, and 
offenses are committed requiring speedy resolution, and 
cannot expect the solemnities of legal trial, then such im- 
prisonment, execution, or other justice done by the law- 
martial is warranted by the king." 

Th'e language used by Mr. Field, the Attorney 
General of the United States, and others, is but the 
echo of the degrading servility and baseness of 
this celebrated advocate of the divine right of kings. 
We do not know whether a grateful master ever 
conferred upon him a judgeship for his services; 
but we have no doubt he obtained a substantial 
reward. 

But even such crouching at the king's footstool 
by the obsequious, politic sergeant, was more than 
even the Lord President of the committee of the 
House of Lords could stomach, for he told the 
Commons: 
" That whi»« at tb.ii Uw conference liberty was glvea 



11 



bv the Lords to the king's counsel to speak what he thought 
fit for his Majesty's service, yet Mr. Sergeant Ashley had no 
authority from them to speak such servile words as he had 
done." 

And how did the manly, noble spirits who at 
that early day had the courage to resist the claim 
of king and counsel to arrest and imprison the 
subjec^ without cause or accusation, answer? 

Said Sir Edward Coke, with his usual quaint- 
ness and directness: 

"As the center of the greatest circle is but a little speck, 
■o the weightiest matter ever lies in a little room. It was a 
wonder for him to hear that the liberty of the subject could 
be thought incompatible with the regality of the king. In 
one point the king's attorney had come close to him. He 
was glad he had awaked him. Because a king is trusted 
with greater things, such as war, money, pardons, &c, 
therefore he should at some times have absolute power 
over the liberty of the subject. We emphatically deny his 
conclusion ; for the liberty of the subject is far more than all 
these ; it is maximum omnium humanorum bonorum— the 
very sovereign of all human blessings. No citizen can thus 
hold his liberties as tenant at will to the sovereign. Mr. 
Speaker, there is no such a tenure to be found in all Lit- 
tleton." , 

" What, "said the king's counsel, " can you ar- 
rest none without process or original writ? The 
suspected fellows may run away." To whom 
Coke answered: 

" The law gives process and indictment, and therefore 
gives all the means that any emergency can demand." 
Said William Mason: 

" It hath been solemnly and clearly resolved by the House 
that the commitment of a freeman, without expressing the 
cause of commitment, is against the law. If you give this 
power by reason of the necessities of the State, you will 
iprin" a leak which may sink all our liberties, and open a 
gap through which Magna Charta and the rest of the stat- 
utes may Issue out and vanish. We must never relinquish 
to the Crown this right to interfere with our liberties." 

In a subsequent debate upon the same subject, 
Sir Edward Coke said: 

" I know that prerogative is part of the law, but sover- 
eign power is no parliamentary word. Take we heed what 
we yield unto. Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will 
have no sovereign." 

These were the sentiments of the men who 
wrested the Petition of Rightfrom the first Charles, 
and compelled him to say, let right be done, as 
ia desired . The object of these bold men was the 
preservation of personal liberty, in conformity to 
the express language of Magna Charta — 

"That no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned but by 
the lawful judgment of his equals, or the law of the land." 

Now, sir, the privilege of the writ of habeas cor- 
pus at that time existed ^at common law. It was 
the remedy for such as were unjustly imprisoned 
to obtain their liberties. Many abuses, however, 
having been introduced in the mode of granting 
it, other statutes were passed. Early in the reign 
of the first Charles, the courts, relying on some 
pretended precedents, determined that they could 
not, upon the habeas corpus, either bail or deliver 
a prisoner, though committed without any cause 
assigned, in case he was committed by the special 
command of the king or by the lords of the privy 
council. This, sir, drew on the parliamentary in- 
quiry which resulted in the Petition of Right, to 
which reference has just been made. The statute 
passed in conformity with that petition enacts 
"that no freeman shall hereafter be so imprisoned 
or detained." But in the following year, Selden 



and others were committed by order of the lords 
in council, pursuant to his Majesty's command, 
under a general charge of notable contempts and 
stirring up seditions against the king'and Govern- 
ment. This gave rise to great excitement in the 
public mind, and to another statute in the sixteenth 
year of the same king. But the habeas corpus act 
of the next reign, originating in the oppression of 
an obscure individual, was considered as another 
Magna Charta by Englishmen. Thus, sir, you 
will note this significant fact, that flagrant abuse 
of powerby the Crown or its ministers was always 
productive of a popular struggle, a struggle that 
proclaims either that the exercise of such power 
was contrary to law, or, if legal, restrains it for 
the future. In speaking of the great habeas corpus 
act passed in the reign of Charles II, Sir William 
Blackstone, writing several years before our Con- 
stitution was formed, and whose invaluable work 
had been studied thoroughly by the men who 
framed that Constitution, says: 

" This writ is of great importance to the public ; for if it 
vyere once left to the power of any, even the highest magis- 
trate, to imprison arbitrarily whenever he or his officers 
thought proper, then there would soon be an end of all other 
rights and immunities. Some have thought that unjust at- 
tacks even upon life or property, at the arbitrary will of the 
magistrate, are less dangerous to the commonwealth than 
such as are made upon the liberty of the subject. To be- 
reave a man of life by violence, to confiscate his estate with- 
out accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an 
act of despotism as would at once convey the alarm of tyr- 
anny throughout the kingdom ; but confinement of the per- 
son by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings 
are unknown and forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, 
and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary power; 
and yet when the State is in imminent danger, even this is 
sometimes a necessary measure; but the happiness of our 
constitution is that it is not left to the executive power 
when the danger of the State is so great as to render this 
measure expedient, for it is the Parliament only can au- 
thorize, when it sees proper, the Crown, by suspending the 
habeas corpus for a short and limited lime, to imprison sus- 
pected persons without giving any reasons therefor." 

And yet, with this array of historical facts star- 
ing him in the face, with all these English analo- 
gies encouraging them to imitate, if not improve 
upon, the noble lessons they should have taught 
them, the late Senator from New Jersey and other 
apologists for executive usurpation endeavor to 
convince their readers and hearers that these 
proud incidents in history had nothing to do with 
originating this habeas corpus clause in our Con- 
stitution. 

No, no, Mr. President, the men of our consti- 
tutional Convention were familiar with the his- 
tory of the civil polity of the world. But more 
thoroughly had they studied the contest that had 
been going on for centuries in the mother country 
between the Crown and the people. Our fathers 
had been protestants against prerogative and its 
usurpations. They had felt the weight of its iron 
hand rest heavy on their loins, and they determ- 
ined to throw it off. They knew how the flood 
of usurpation had attempted to overwhelm their 
fathers, and they placed this habeas corpus clause 
in the Constitution of the new Government they 
were framing that it might stand there for all time 
as the great breakwater against the efforts of arbi- 
trary power. 

In the argument of my predecessor, Mr. Presi- 
dent, I find he asserts " that when the habeas cor- 



12 



pus clause was inserted in the Constitution the 
United States had no writ of habeas corpus." He 
lays down this self-evident proposition as though 
it was some'startling truth. It is true that at this 
time the United States had no writ of habeas cor- 
pus, because there was no such Government as the 
United States. But if by this he meant to convey 
the idea that the colonial governments did not rec- 
ognize the existence of the writ, or that the States 
did not, I take issue with him. The old constitu- 
tion of his own State, adopted two days before the 
Declaration of Independence, and a dozen years 
before the Constitution, contains this clause: 

"The common law of England, as well as so much of 
the statute laws as have been heretofore practiced in this 
colony, shall remain in force until they shall be altered by 
a future law of the Legislature." 

And most of the State constitutions adopted 
after the Declaration contain similar clauses. 

But Mr. Field caps the climax of folly and 
presumption when he declares that all experience 
teaches that the only safe depositary of this power 
to suspend the privilege of the great writ is the Ex- 
ecutive which the Constitution has made for us, 
standing upon the only basis of the Constitution, 
with no other support than the integrity and pa- 
triotism of the man who has been elected to it by 
the people. Heaven preserve us if this be so! 
We have seen judges torn from the very seat of 
judgment by this Executive. We have seen the 
absolute rights of the citizen made a delusion and 
a mockery of, and the whole land startled by 
usurpation after usurpation, directed, controlled, 
and justified by this very Executive. 

The late Senator from New Jerseyappearsin his 
very elaborate speech to have a very strange mode 
of deriving the power in the President to suspend 
this writ, from the peculiarphraseology of the two 
sentences: 

" All executive power shall be vested in the President of 
the United States; and all legislative power herein granted 
shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." 

To the first clause he gives a general construc- 
tion; to the last a special and limited, insisting 
that while Congress is confined by the terms of 
the grant specially to the exercise of only such 
powers as are enumerated, the executive power is 
beyond and above the Constitution; or, in other 
words, the President neither in peace or war has 
any limits set to his authority. His will must be 
the law, and his sworn duty is to define what is 
necessary and proper, while the duty of the people 
%ver whom he sways the scepter is to obey. This 
is certainly the fair interpretation to be given to 
the conclusions of Mr. Field's singular logic: 

" If you give the powers to Congress, they should be spe- 
cially named in the grant; but not so with the Executive, 
inasmuch as the •power, from its very nature, is an executive 
power.'' 

In other words, in plainer English, the people's 
representatives, in the exercise of their powers, 
are confined strictly to the words of the grant; 
whereas the Executive takes any and all power 
by implication. Well, surely this is a novel mode 
of interpretation, and an interpretation which I 
hardly think the good people of New Jersey would 
be willing to adopt. It is in accordance, however, 
with the base servility of the times, and most cer- 
tainly entitles its author to a place on the United 



States bench, where he can elaborate more fully 
this peculiar dogma, and, if necessary, aid the 
embodiment of the war power at the other end 
of the avenue in carrying out and consummating 
his peculiar edicts. We had always supposed 
that " the short term for which the President was 
elected, and the narrow limits to which his power 
was confined, manifested the jealousy and appre- 
hension of future danger which the framers of the 
Constitution felt in relation to that department of 
the Government." At least so once said Chief 
Justice Marshall. But a greater than Marshall is 
here in the person and theories of the late Sena- 
tor from New Jersey. He has seen a marvelous 
light, which certainly was not vouchsafed to the 
eyes of the men, who laid the foundations of this 
Government, and who certainly, if we are not 
presuming, understood the true theory and sys- 
tem of our Government much better than Mr. 
Field. 

Mr. Field appears really to me, throughout the 
whole course of his speech and his singular posi- 
tions, to have presented us with a very good imi- 
tation of the Q.uack in Moliere's play of" The 
Sick Man in Spite of Himself. " Geronte in that 
play, in amazement, says to the Q.uack: 

" My dear doctor, you reason well, but there is one thing 
that staggers me in your lucid explanations. I always 
thought, till now, that the heart was on the left side and the 
liver on the right. 

"Quack. Ay, sir, so they were formerly, but we hav* 
changed all that. The college proceeds on an entirely new 
method. 

"Geronte. I ask pardon, sir. 

"Quack. Not at all. Oh, there is no harm done. You 
are not obliged to know as much as we do." 

It may be that this is the case with the unen- 
lightened people of New Jersey. They are not by 
any means obliged to know as much as Mr. Field; 
and I fervently trust that they never may, and 
will never consent to indorse and subscribe to any 
of the teachings of that school. If they do, their 
liberties are gone. 

I turn from such an atrocious sentiment to the 
sentiments of Daniel Webster, who understood 
so fully where existed the limits within which ex- 
ecutive power could move, and upon whose well- 
defined lines were written the warning words — 
thus far shalt thou go and no further. In his speech 
on Jackson's protest, he said: 

" Who is he that belies the blood and libels the fame of 
his ancestry by declaring that the security for freedom rests 
in executive authority; who is he that invokes the execu- 
tive power to come to the protection of liberty ; who is he 
that charges them with the insanity and recklessness of 
putting the lamb beneath the lion's paw? No, sir; no, sir. 
Our security both in war and in peace is in our watchful- 
ness of executive power. Sir, I will never trust executive 
power to keep the vigils of liberty." 

These are right royal words, and I would have 
them written upon the walls of all the private and 
public seminaries of the land, that our youths might 
be taught early to fear the advance of arbitrary 
power. I would have them writtenabove the altars 
of the churches, that the priests and theircongre- 
gations might learn what lawful authority meafrs, 
of which they prate so much and know so little. 
I would have them engraved upon the door-posts 
of these Houses of Congress, that the represent- 
atives of the States and the people might be taught 
in what way the rightsand liberties of this people 



13 



are to be guarded from encroachment. Mr. Pres- 
ident, when we contrast the Argus-like vigilance 
of such men as Henry, Martin, Barbour, of the 
revolutionary era, and contrast their indignant 
protests against executive encroachment and their 
jealousy of executive power with the thoughtless 
indifference and wretched subserviency of men 
who profess to be statesmen and patriots, we may 
well stand aghast at the fearful degeneracy of the 
times. 

Can it be possible that these disinterested pa- 
triots of our early day were mistaken, and that 
the men of our day, whose chief patriotism seems 
to consist in supporting themselves out of the cof- 
fers of a straitened Treasury, could thus strangely 
discover the true theory of this Government? 
Our modern political philosophers would incul- 
cate that when the Government is in a hand-to- 
hand conflict with revolted States, we must put 
all confidence in the executive head of this nation ; 
nay, that we must permit him to execute power, 
even if it savors of despotism, on the Jesuitical 
principle that the end justifies the means. Now, 
on the contrary, Mr. President, 1 hold that it is 
at just such times as these when the mind of the 
true patriot should be most distrustful, when his 
eye should be the most watchful, and when, with 
the arm'ed force surrounding the Executive, he 
should be the more suspicious of the authority 
that controls it. But when, instead of confining] 



the exercise of power within the well-defined lines 
of the Constitution, he finds it breaking down all 
the guards and fences that surround him, and in- 
vading those sacred precincts where the liberty of 
person, of speech, and of thought were supposed 
to be guarded with more than Argus-like vigilance, 
the true patriot should arraign such despotic at- 
tempt, although all the terrors of imprisonment, 
nay, of death itself, should surround him. 

It is a libel upon the spirit of our forefathers, 
it is a libel upon the men who framed our Con- 
stitution, to suppose that any such authority can 
exist in the Federal head of this Government. In 
the m'idst of the gloom of the present, with the 
eye of faith methinks I can see around us and 
above us some faint harbingers of hope for the 
future. As Columbus sailed toward that new 
world he gave to Castile and to Leon, while mu- 
tiny was in the vessel, and around him the dreary 
waste of waters murmuring only despair, we are 
told that flowers and carved woods came float- 
ing around his vessel, while resting on his mast- 
heads were birds of the most gorgeous plumage. 
So to us, sir, in the midst of the gloom of the pres- 
ent, come here and there these harbingers of the 
firmer land to which we are sailing. God hasten 
our coming, that we may once again, that we may 
once more plant our feet upon its firm foundations, 
the land of constitutional freedom, the hope of the 
world. 



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